Spec Ops: The Line

Spec Ops: The Line is a game with a complicated legacy, especially for those who were not around or paying attention during its initial release. As just about everyone reading this is aware, Yager created this game as a commentary and critique of the military shooter genre that had become wildly popular ever since the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in 2007. Historical shooters, like the WW2 shooter craze that lasted for a ridiculous amount of time in its own right, have the story told, and can work around that to create setpieces that match or are inspired by the stories we are taught in school. Making a game about a modern setting, such as the Gulf Wars or the "War on Terror" post-9/11 is a lot more challenging because it's both too recent for the full public to get a handle on the seriousness of, and far more insidious than the US government would like you to believe. There is no draft, it takes place in a far-away place, and the "bad guys" have a totally different culture and way of life - it's a perfectly docile war that does not linger much in the back of the average American's mind.

So what's the challenge with portraying these wars in a game, then? For one, historical accuracy is out of the fucking window, because a lot of the truth of certain battles and engagements won't be declassified for a long time. But even things we do know about are recklessly and blatantly distorted to obfuscate the United States' involvement in the atrocity. Take 2019's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, which framed the real-life American-led bombings and killings on the "Highway of Death" just outside of Kuwait as something that Russia did, and that the good guy Americans were acting on to stop. This type of historical revision is much more popular than one discrete example, as even things like playing adrenaline-pumping music and altering the tone of these engagements as "fair" also count as foul play by the developers. Even more disgusting than the historical misrepresentation, though, is that this was the first wave of games, ever, to desensitize the world to violence that was still being actively perpetuated.

In Medal of Honor, one can feel eventually desensitized to the violent acts they are committing against the Axis Forces, as they were bound together by ideals of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and rampant imperialism - by nearly every Western account, they were the enemy of the world. Crucially, though, we as a society had enough time to digest the fallout of WW2 over the last 70 years to arrive at that conclusion. It may have been pretty obvious early on to many or most, but that framing has persisted from generation to generation, which creates context that people are willing to play around in as artists. It's a universal truth that if you see the Nazi swastika in a film, the men bearing it are intended to be villains. Now how do you extrapolate that to an ongoing conflict, especially one as asymmetric as the current War on Terror the US is engaging in perpetuity in the Middle East? Who will history see as the aggressor, the victor, the side deserving of sympathy? My guess, although it's predicated on the good faith of a lot of people that don't always provide it, is that America will almost certainly not be seen as heroes in this conflict. But we don't have the historical context and fallout of the wars to yet engrain that in the modern populous. This gets at the heart of the dangers of these modern shooters - they are proactively creating a framing and context for the public at large, subconsciously, by placing the player of a massively successful gaming franchise in the shoes of American military in these settings, garnering sympathy for their cause and experiences.

So not only do modern shooters lack context to explore their themes properly because of the conflict being on-going, they actively create false pretenses by way of boots-on-the-ground perspectives, historical revisionism, and gamifying the murders of Middle Eastern folks of all creeds and cultures, while the real life equivalent is happening simultaneously. That's a whirlwind of propaganda, especially when you take into account that American schools purposefully do not explain much about modern history in grade school or even in high school. For some kids, these games might be the only serious media representation of the Gulf Wars that they experience, and that severely damages their opinion and perspective on a conflict that has, by and large, been unjustifiable imperialist bullshit.

"Ok, but what the fuck does this have to do with the game?" I hear you screaming.

The reason for that wall of context above is that this is the fundamental basis for the existence of Spec Ops: The Line at all. The goal of the game, above all else, is to re-introduce context that portrays these modern conflicts exactly how they are - disgusting beyond belief, with no clear moral victory for American troops, a peak into the un-gamification of war and how even the most remotely disconnected killings (by way of drone, mortar, or other) have massive consequences in real life, and ABOVE ALL ELSE, that any real-world conflict of this kind results in thousands of unnecessary deaths of innocent people, and to portray otherwise is sick and irresponsible. I will say, however, that the way the game goes about this is particularly harsh towards the player (who presumably purchased the game for $60 or so upon its first release), which has caused some backlash in the "second wave" of consumers that played the game as it started to be sold for very cheap or included in 2K bundles and the like. So briefly, we've got to talk marketing.

Spec Ops: The Line, as far as I can remember, was not marketed as a deconstruction of the modern shooter. While it did boast an intense new story, the majority of its marketing appeal was to rebrand the admittedly terrible Spec Ops series into something that looked appealing to the brand new market of players that enjoyed modern shooters. At a glance of the gameplay, almost nothing about it looks all that interesting, either - it's a cover-based third person shooter set in Dubai, and you play with very standard weapon types for the genre and shoot a bunch of guys in face coverings. Pretty straightforward and par for the course. However, the realization that this game was not going to be pleasant and give the player the conclusion of the promised super-soldier power fantasy was, in my opinion, meant to be a surprise. At the time, that deconstructionist switch caused a massive spike in critical reception, with some reviewers calling it gaming's answer to "Heart of Darkness." In the current lens of the game's digital life cycle, where it's regularly sold for under $5 and thrown into dozens of different bundles for the cheap, this bait and switch premise is by far the most widely-known thing about it, which dulls the impact quite a bit in retrospect. In that respect, it's very much gaming's The Sixth Sense, where unfortunately a bit of novelty is baked into the experience that is lost almost immediately after release, and gets worse with time.

Additionally, some of the approaches to Spec Ops' philosophy are a bit heavy-handed. The infamous quotes of peace and historical wisdom displayed upon death in the Call of Duty games are replaced with direct attacks on the player's moral fiber. Just as a sampling of what you might see:

- "To kill for yourself is murder. To kill for your government is heroic. To kill for entertainment is harmless."
- "The US military usually does not condone the killing of unarmed combatants. But this isn't real, so why should you care?"
- "Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two conflicting ideas simultaneously."
and most famously,
- "Do you feel like a hero yet?"

This approach leaves a sour taste in the mouths of those who embrace the game's critique on the genre, who sought out the game specifically to experience how one would begin to deconstruct the modern shooter. Many players are very much in agreement with the premise and identify similar industry-wide problems as the developers at Yager do. This is a bit of an oversight by the developers who clearly meant for the game to infiltrate the average consumer's library and then confront them with the reality of their actions. Framing the player as the antagonist is appropriate in that context - if a bit risky considering they just paid $60 for the game - but its new place in history deems it something so far outside the norm of the shooter canon that it's rarely approached with that perspective in earnest, and now played mostly by those that wish to judge the effectiveness and clarity of its critique. By nature, they must experience the game too, and be put in positions where their ideologies are confronted and questioned, even if they do not hold the subconscious beliefs of the original intended audience. This sums up to an experience and critique that, to put it lightly, has not aged particularly well, as its focus was simply too narrow.

There is a case to be made that Yager were going for a hail-mary play that disregarded the longevity of the game, considering the generic look and branding of the title in an oversaturated market, but it holds itself back by not being able to detach itself from the context of its release. Gaming also has an inherent bias toward the player being able to "solve" the situation they are placed in, which has resulted in many clamoring for the ability to always do the right thing throughout the game, and the lack of such moral options proving that it's a weak critique because the player is never able to act in a pious or beneficial way. Adding these options, though, would be catestrophically hypocritical on behalf of the developers, who intentionally present the situation as it exists in the real-world space it emulates - one without any moral clarity or simple, one-man fixes. Not only does Spec Ops: The Line take on the industry in which is is afforded an existence, but also the player for whom it is designed. There is no written contract with gaming that it must always serve as morally reaffirming comfort, but I do empathize with those who try very hard to do the right thing in Spec Ops and are continually rejected. This is, in a very distilled way, the point: even the "best" choice available is sometimes immoral.

The final point I'd like to address is that all of the atrocities seen and executed by the player in Spec Ops: The Line are completely out of self-preservation. If the three soldiers you command throughout the game were killed in the initial confrontation in the outskirts of Dubai, there is reason to believe that hundreds if not thousands of lives would have been saved. The final choice that the game presents you with is to continue playing it. Every fight is perpetuated specifically to keep the player alive and to make "progress" through the narrative, so if you were to give up on making progress, these digital lives could be saved, and you'd have less blood on your hands. This is a completely unprecedented design choice up until the point of Spec Ops' release, and it's a bit contentious due to the consumerist nature of the industry. "You really want me to just stop playing a game I paid money for?" is a question that is commonly discussed. However, in contrast to the game's slowly dwindling "gotcha" that has come to define the genre, this choice posed to the player ages like a fine wine, becoming increasingly more appealing as the price point of entry for the game continues to decrease. Eventually, if this game were to be released as freeware, its most crucial and controversial element may be actualized: choosing to walk away becomes an option that is untethered to the human instinct to feel a sense of ownership over that which their dollars buy.

In closing, I do think that Spec Ops is a very conceptually strong game with good, if unempathetic methods of getting those concepts across. Its execution is shaky at times, and it resides a lot in the realm of satire for its 2012 contemporaries; games are increasingly being perceived as isolated experiences, and Spec Ops is one of the few that truly cannot be detached from the world it was made in. It is highly experimental and occasionally outright confrontational to the player both as a person and a consumer, and as a result is not guaranteed to be a pleasant or even comfortable experience for many. I do think that very few games warrant such discussion and that to alter some of the fundamental design decisions would be to undermine the message behind the madness, even if that means going against some of the most sacred "unwritten rules" of engagement that games have historically had with the player. Spec Ops: The Line will likely stand the test of time as a game studied for both its courage and the controversy it sought to create.

Shoot, kill, reload, shoot, kill, change weapon, shoot, kill... You know this scheme, right? So when you play Spec Ops: The Line you should feel at home.
You are a Delta Force soldier send on a mission to Dubai which was destroyed by sandstorms. You have to kill plenty of bad guys (most of them are Americans, but they are BAD Americans, who went rogue, so it's OK to kill them). And when I say plenty I mean a lot of them. It will be fun, Dubai even after a sandstorm is a nice play right?

Of course it is. It is a beautiful city where you can have fun while killing a tons of bad guys. You are an American soldier, so you are a hero by design. There is no way that there is a slight possibility that you could do something wrong or at least morally ambiguous You kill enemies or you kill traitors (so...also the enemies). And in the end you know what happens. You are going back home and you are a celebrated hero.

So if you like when you know that you are on the right side, when it's clear who is your opponent and who is your friend, when everything is obvious from the beginning to the end, then...

THIS IS NOT A GAME FOR YOU.

After all the door kicking, screaming, blindfire, grenade tossing, and turret handling, a soldier always walks away from battle alive with a strong moral compass intact. This last detail is the most disparate departure from reality that modern military shooters make.

Though we like to glorify soldiers in our entertainment, it’s impossible to look past the toll that killing takes on a person’s psyche in real life. To say the least, virtual soldiers seem to have a knack for shrugging off this psychological weight as easily as a shotgun blast to the shin.

Spec Ops, however, is a game that likes to remind the player that every murder is paid in blood or, in the very least, a small loss of identity. As the narrative drives forward. the soldiers of Delta Force start to lose their morality. With no superior to give them orders and no comrades to cheer them on, they are reduced to killing machines walking a long road, hoping for an answer at its ends -- not so much unlike the player.

A soldier is nothing without orders and the orders are simple: Infiltrate Dubai to provide recon on missing Colonel John Konrad and his outfit, The Damned 33rd. By the time Captain Martin Walker and his two soldiers, Lugo and Adams, arrive, these orders mean little.

The modern paradise of Dubai has been ravaged by sandstorms, spurring chaos on the streets below. At this point, Walker decides this is a rescue mission, not a reconnaissance mission. It’s not the last order he’ll give his team, but it’s certainly the most innocuous.

Inspired by Heart of Darkness, Spec Ops is a harrowing, unassuming look at modern warfare. It neither glorifies it nor condemns the player and Walker, as tough decisions are made. Do you kill the thief or the soldier that murdered his family in response? Do you rescue the civilians or the opposing agent that may provide you with the information you need? Though Spec Ops' decisions are binary -- and mostly predetermined -- at least the moral views binding behind them aren't. In Spec Ops, you can only choose the least terrible decision and hope it eventually leads to a positive outcome.

Converse to the lofty narrative direction of the game, Spec Ops plays it safe as far as mechanics are concerned. One in medias res helicopter turret sequence later and you are thrown into cover-based shooter 101: swap cover, roadie run to avoid fire, blindfire when enemies are close, etc.

Though Spec Ops covers the basics, it covers them well, offering some of the most enjoyable cover-based battles since Gears of War popularized the concept. Guns are weighty and difficult to aim, making a tricky headshot feel all the more rewarding. Areas are wide and pregnant with tactical possibilities both horizontally and vertically.

While taking cover feels good, maneuvering around it is a different story. In a misguided attempt to appear realistic, Spec Ops does away with Gears of War dodge-rolls and makes it dumbfoundingly difficult to avoid a grenade. You can’t throw it back, you can’t roll out of the way, and turning and running is more difficult than it should be (you need to double-rap the run button and press in a given direction, only for the game to frequently misread your command.) Once you get to the final chapters of the game, these problems with the game’s combat become hard to ignore. This applies tenfold to the rather lifeless multiplayer, where elevation and good cover will win a firefight nine times out of ten. Every time an enemy/player tosses a grenade near you, forcing you to awkwardly detach from cover and run, you'll want to throw down the controller.

One thing that puts Spec Ops ahead of the pact is its squad dynamic. For the majority of the game, you’ll have Lugo and Adams to bark orders at. Though you can’t dictate their positioning as you can in the underrated Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas or Mass Effect series, you are able to direct their fire onto a specific enemy. This becomes increasingly helpful since they frequently snipe and lob grenades at targets. Additionally, there are a handful of stealth sequences where you can exploit their snipe command, making these encounters a cakewalk (don’t fret: You can always break stealth.) I love this mechanic because it gives you something to do, while recovering health behind cover. The momentum of battle doesn't feel like a constant stop-start affair, like Gears of War and Uncharted.

There are occasions where the AI doesn’t act as it should. I encountered a couple instances where a teammate would throw a grenade at an enemy directly in front of me and him, instead of melee him like any rational soldier would. The enemy AI isn’t so hot, either. The big heavy enemies will slowly walk toward your cover and then stand in front of it, as if an invisible barrier blocks their path to your obliteration. This made me succeed in some tough encounters later in the game, but I didn’t feel like I survived by my skill and wits, as a result. The AI is far from broken, but it’s one of the many things that plays directly against the grim reality that Spec Ops’ narrative tries so hard to build.

While Spec Ops often reminded me of Apocalypse Now, there were also many moments where it brought to mind The Rock. Some characters feel cartoonish in their aspirations (a radio DJ barking nonsense throughout the game, for instance), many helicopter chases are had, and the game loves to make things explode: grenades, barrels, buildings, you name it!

The much talked about sand tech and environmental destructibility are nice gimmicks but they don’t drastically change the flow of combat. It’s cathartic to wipe out a turret nest by flooding it with sand, flowing out of a nearby window, but I didn’t feel particularly crafty in shooting the marked objects in question. The scripted sandstorms that block your vision are just plain annoying.

Spec Ops is a mixed bag in its visuals. The game spent a long time in development hell and it shows, particularly in the player models and dull texture work. While the exterior cityscapes are lavish and broad, the interiors rarely capture the luxury and glamor of Dubai. The setting is full of potential, so it’s very disappointing to see the developer rarely make use of it. Instead, we are given a decrepit ghost land full of charred bodies and civilians that feel mythical in their rare appearance, despite the story revolving around their presence. The game isn't without technical hiccups either, the most criminal of which are the prerecorded cutscenes that are terribly compressed, looking like 360p YouTube videos at times.

Nuance in Spec Ops is restricted to the game’s storytelling which is dense and compelling. I can’t think of another game where I replayed chapters, after beating it, for the sole purpose of fully understanding the gravity of key story moments. While Spec Ops could have delivered some plot details more clearly, there is an appeal to how vague of a web it weaves; at times, leaving some major information to collectible intel items scattered around levels. Sitting through the credits of a game while you piece together its complex story in your head is a rarity in videogames.

There are better cover-based shooters, better multiplayer shooters, and games that deal with moral choice in a more open manner, but Spec Ops isn’t about any of those things even though it includes all of them. At the end of the day, this is a game that drives the player forth by proposing questions; some relating to the plot -- you’ll ask “why?” as often as Walker and company -- others relating to your own ethics, but all of which are much more compelling devices than anything offered by Spec Ops’ competitors.

In an odd way, it almost comes as a relief that the multiplayer isn’t worth sticking around for. At worst, it’d be an entertaining distraction for a week. At best, it’d be an ignorable distraction that doesn't sully a thoughtful, complex narrative about there being no heroes in war. Only killers.

We don’t need to come to terms with killing people, because it’s all fun and games for us. Not so for Captain Walker, who must find reason and purpose in his rampage. Walking that long sandy, bloody road through Dubai is one of the most captivating gaming experiences of 2012 because of it.